Taskstream Further Streamlines Outcomes Assessment Processes

NEW YORK (January 28, 2010) — Taskstream, the leading provider of a centralized online system for institutions to manage all assessment, accreditation, and e-portfolio activities, released today the latest versions of its two platforms, the Accountability Management System (AMS) by Taskstream and the Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) by Taskstream. “We are pleased to announce the release of the latest upgrade to Taskstream,” said Kevin Doyle, Taskstream’s CEO. “With the growing importance placed on assessment and transparency throughout education, more institutions than ever are looking to Taskstream to support efficient, collaborative processes for analyzing and demonstrating the achievement of student learning outcomes. The significant enhancements in this release further extend our clients’ ability to demonstrate and improve their educational effectiveness.”

The Accountability Management System (AMS) by Taskstream
With the launch of AMS, Taskstream provided educational organizations with greatly needed capabilities for centrally managing assessment initiatives across the organization, including the means to plan and document outcomes, assessment methods, findings, and actions for improvement. This release offers several enhancements to help organizations manage their assessment and planning activities more efficiently and effectively, including:

Assessment Plan Reports – Providing powerful insights into the assessment planning process, these new reports offer both summary and detailed views of the information collected for a given assessment cycle, including the total number of outcomes, planned measures and measures with documented findings, as well as more detailed information, such as the number and percentage of direct vs. indirect measures planned.

Operational & Action Plan Reports – With these new reports, organizational leaders are better equipped to ensure that programs and departments throughout the organization are closing the assessment loop by planning actions for improvement based upon findings. These reports provide both summary and detailed views of the information documented in action plans, including the total number of actions, the number and percentage of actions with documented status reports, the total amount of budget requests, and more.

Linking of Action Items to Assessment Findings – Beyond linking actions to outcomes and objectives, action items can now be directly associated with the documented findings for a particular assessment method used to measure the outcome. In this way, a more direct link can be established between the results of the assessment and plans for improvement.
Improved Course Assessment Planning – Several usability and performance improvements, including enhanced course creation and searching features, ensure that AMS is even better suited to manage assessment planning and documentation activities at the course-level.

The Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) by Taskstream
For over a decade, learners and educators have utilized the LAT by Taskstream to demonstrate and assess performance through electronic portfolios, rubric scoring and data reporting and analysis. Some of the new features and enhancements that help educators to analyze and support student learning in this release include:

Versioning of Submitted Work Over Time – LAT’s robust portfolio-based performance assessment system supports workflows in which student artifacts and reflections are sent back for revision. With this new feature, evaluators now have the option to save copies of submitted student work when sending it back to students for revision, thereby archiving multiple attempts of the same assignment to demonstrate improvement over time.

Enhanced Linking of Standards and Rubric Criteria – Organizations seek effective ways to assess student achievement of defined standards, competencies and outcomes. While LAT has long provided robust functionality to support this need, new capabilities in this launch further streamline this process and make it easier for organizations to collect, report out, and analyze standards-based assessment data.

More Detailed Inter-Rater Reliability Reporting – Whether for calibrating assessors to score consistently using standard rubrics or for conducting multiple assessments on a regular basis, inter-rater reliability comparisons are essential. With this upgrade, these comparisons can now be made at the rubric criterion level, rather than limiting them to final scores.

Supervisor and District Records and Zip Code Search for Field Placements – Organizations managing information about field placements, internships, rotations and other remote educational experiences using LAT’s field placement system are now able to create records for storing and reporting on information about supervisors and districts. Combined with a new capability for searching the database for sites and staff by zip code and several smaller enhancements, these new features provide greater support for managing student learning opportunities in the field.

Taskstream delivers new versions of its industry-leading software at least twice a year, consistently innovating to meet the continuous improvement, assessment, accountability, and e-portfolio needs of its growing user base. Because the company’s solutions are Web-based and centrally managed, these semiannual upgrades do not require any technical work on the part of Taskstream’s client institutions and individual subscribers.

Contact
Courtney Peagler
Vice President of Strategic and Business Development
(212) 868-2700cpeagler@taskstream.com